her
image I most often masturbated to—it was Jolanta I had the greatest trouble speaking to, not because she was the most coarse but because I was the most afraid of her.
“How can you recognize a Polish prostitute?” she asked me. I had to ask Frank for a translation. “Because she pays
you
to fuck
her
,” Jolanta said. This I understood without Frank’s help.
“Did you get it?” Frank asked me.
“Jesus, yes, Frank,” I said.
“Then laugh,” Frank said. “You’d better laugh.” And I looked at Jolanta’s hands—she had the wrists of a farmer, the knuckles of a boxer—and laughed.
Dark Inge was not a laugher. She’d had a most unhappy life. More important, she had not lived very
much
of her life, yet; she was only eleven. A mulatto—with an Austrian mother and a black American G. I. for her father—she’d been born at the start of the occupation. Her father had left with the occupying powers, in 1955, and nothing he’d told Inge or her mother about the treatment of black people in the United States had made them want to go with him. Dark Inge’s English was the best among the whores, and when Father left for France—to identify the bodies of Mother and Egg—it was Dark Inge we spent most of our sleepless nights with. She was as tall as I was, although she was only Lilly’s age, and the way they dressed her up made her look as old as Franny. Lithe and pretty and mocha-colored, she worked as a tease; she was not a real whore.
She was not allowed to stroll the Krugerstrasse without another whore beside her, unless she strolled the Krugerstrasse with Susie the bear; when any man wanted her, he was told he could only look at her—and touch himself. Dark Inge was not old enough to be touched, and no man was allowed to be alone in a room with her. If a man wanted to be with her, Susie the bear kept them company. It was a simple system, but it worked. If a man looked as if he was about to touch Dark Inge, Susie the bear would make the necessary sounds and gestures preparatory to a charge. If the man asked Dark Inge to take off too many clothes, or if he insisted she
look
at him while he masturbated, Susie the bear would get restless. “You’re making the bear hostile,” Dark Inge would warn the man, who would leave—or else finish masturbating quickly, while Dark Inge looked away.
All the whores knew that Susie the bear could get to their rooms in a matter of seconds. All it required was some cry of distress, because Susie—like any well-trained animal—knew all their voices by heart. Babette’s nasal little yelp, Jolanta’s violent bellow, Old Billig’s shattering “mementos.” But to us children the worst customers were the shame-faced men who masturbated to only the most modest glimpses of Dark Inge.
“I don’t think
I
could beat off with a bear in my room,” Frank said.
“I don’t think you could beat off with
Susie
in your room, Frank,” Franny said.
Lilly shuddered, and I joined her. With Father in France—with those bodies most important to us—we viewed the body traffic in the Gasthaus Freud with that detachment peculiar to mourners.
“When I get old enough,” Dark Inge told us, “I can charge for the real thing.” It surprised us children that “the real thing” cost more money than beating off while watching Inge.
Dark Inge’s mother was planning to get Inge out of the business by the time her daughter was “old enough.” Dark Inge’s mother planned to retire her daughter before her daughter came of age. Dark Inge’s mother was the fifth lady of the night in the Gasthaus Freud—the one called Screaming Annie. She made more money than any other whore on the Krugerstrasse, because she was working for a respectable retirement (for her daughter
and
for herself).
If you wanted a frail flower, or a little French, you asked for Babette. If you wanted experience, and a bargain, you got Old Billig. If you courted danger—if you liked a touch of violence—you could take your chances with Jolanta. If you were ashamed of yourself, you could pay to steal a look at Dark Inge. And if you desired the ultimate deception, you went with Screaming Annie.
As Susie the bear said, “Screaming Annie’s got the best fake orgasm in the business.”
Screaming Annie’s fake orgasm could jar Lilly out of her worst nightmares, it could cause Frank to sit bolt upright in bed and howl in terror at the dark figure of the dressmaker’s dummy lurking at the foot of his bed, it could rip me out of the deepest sleep—suddenly wide-awake, with an erection, or grabbing my own throat to feel where it was slashed. Screaming Annie, in my opinion, was an argument—all by herself—for
not
having the whores occupy the floor most immediately above our own.
She could even stir Father out of his grief—even upon his immediate return from France. “Jesus God,” he would say, and come to kiss each of us, and see if we were safe.
Only Freud could sleep through it. “Leave it to Freud,” Frank said, “to not be fooled by a fake orgasm.” Frank thought himself very clever for this oft-repeated remark—because, of course, he meant the
other
Freud, not our blind manager.
Screaming Annie could sometimes fool even Susie the bear, who would grumble, “God, that’s got to be a
real
one.” Or, worse, Susie would occasionally confuse a fake orgasm with a possible scream for
help
. “
That’s
nobody
coming
, for Christ’s sake!” Susie would roar, reminding me of Ronda Ray. “That is somebody
dying
!” And she would go bawling down the second-floor hall, throw herself against Screaming Annie’s door, charge the wrecked bed with her terrifying snarls—causing Screaming Annie’s mate to fly, or faint, or wither on the spot. And Screaming Annie would say, mildly, “No no, Susie, nothing’s wrong. He’s a
nice
man.” By which time it was often too late to revive the man—at the very least reduced to a cringing, shrunken shape of fear.
“That’s the ultimate guilt trip,” Franny used to say. “Just when some guy’s about to get off, a bear busts into the room and starts mauling him.”
“Actually, honey,” Susie told Franny, “I think some of them get off on
that
.”
Were there actually some customers at the Gasthaus Freud who could
only
come when attacked by a bear? I wondered. But we were too young; we would never know some things about that place. Like the ghouls of all our Halloweens past, the clientele in the Gasthaus Freud would never be quite real for us. At least not the whores, and their customers—and not the radicals.
Old Billig (the
radical
Old Billig) was the first to arrive. Like Iowa Bob, he said he was too old to waste what was left of his life asleep. He got there so early in the morning that he occasionally passed the last whore on his way in, her way out. This was inevitably Screaming Annie, working the hardest hours—to save herself and her dark daughter.
Susie the bear slept in the early morning hours. There was little whore trouble after dawn, as if the light kept people safe—if not always honest—and the radicals never started quarreling before midmorning. Most of the radicals were late sleepers. They wrote their manifestos all day, and made their threatening phone calls. They harassed each other—“in the absence of more tangible enemies,” Father would say of them. Father, after all, was a capitalist. Who else could even imagine the perfect hotel? Who but a capitalist, and a basic non-rocker of the boat, would even
want
to live in a hotel, to manage a non-industry, to sell a product that was sleep—not work—a product that was at least rest if not recreation? My father thought the radicals were more ludicrous than the whores. I think that after the death of my mother my father felt familiar with the confusions of lust and loneliness; perhaps he was even grateful for “the business”—as the whores called their work.
He was less sympathetic to the world-changers, to the idealists bent on altering the unpleasantries of human nature. This surprises me, now, because I think of Father as simply another kind of idealist—but of course Father was more determined to outlive unpleasantries than change them. That my father would never learn German also kept him isolated from the radicals; by comparison, the whores spoke better English.
The radical Old Billig knew one phrase of English. He liked to tickle Lilly, or give her a lollipop, while he teased her. “Yankee go home,” he would say to her, lovingly.
“He’s a sweet old fart,” Franny said. Frank tried to teach Old Billig another English phrase that Frank thought Billig would like.
“Imperialist dog,” Frank would say, but Billig got this hopelessly confused with “Nazi swine,” and it always came out strange.
The radical who spoke the best English used the code name Fehlgeburt. It was Frank who first explained to me that
Fehlgeburt
means “miscarriage” in German.
“As in ‘miscarriage of justice,’ Frank?” Franny asked. “No,” Frank said. “The other kind. The
baby
kind of miscarriage,” Frank said.
Fräulein Fehlgeburt, as she was called—Miss Miscarriage, to us children—had never been pregnant, thus had never miscarried; she was a university student whose code name was “Miscarriage” because the only other woman on the staff of the Symposium on East-West Relations had the code name “Pregnant.”
She
had been. Fräulein Schwanger—for
schwanger
means “pregnant” in German—was an older woman, Father’s age, who was famous in Viennese radical circles for a past pregnancy. She had written a whole book about being pregnant, and another book—a kind of sequel to the first-about having an abortion. When she was first pregnant she had worn a bright red sign saying “pregnant” on her chest—SCHWANGER!—under which, in letters of the same size, was the question “ARE YOU THE FATHER?” It had made a sensational book jacket, too, and she had donated all her royalties to various radical causes. Her subsequent abortion—and
that
book—had made her a popular subject for controversy; she could still draw a crowd when she gave a speech, and she was a loyal donator of the proceeds. Schwanger’s abortion book—published in 1955, simultaneously with the end of the occupation—had made the expulsion of this unwanted child symbolic of Austria’s freeing herself from the occupying powers. “The father,” Schwanger wrote, “could have been Russian, French, British, or American; at least to my body, and to my way of thinking, he was an unwanted foreigner.”
Schwanger was close to Susie the bear; the two shared a great many rape theories together. But Schwanger would also befriend my father; she appeared to be the most consoling to him, after my mother’s loss, not because there was anything “between” them (as they say) but because the calmness of her voice—the steady, soft cadence of her speech—was the most like my mother’s of all the voices in Gasthaus Freud. Like my mother, Schwanger was a gentle persuader. “I’m just a realist,” she had a way of saying, so innocently—though her hopes for wiping the slate clean, for starting a new world, from scratch, were as fervent as the fire dreams of any of the radicals.
Schwanger took us children with her, several times a day, for coffee with milk and cinnamon and whipped cream at the Kaffee Europa on Kärntnerstrasse—or to the Kaffee Mozart at Albertinaplatz Zwei, just behind the State Opera. “In case you don’t know it,” Frank would say, later—and over and over, “
The Third Man
was filmed at the Kaffee Mozart.” Schwanger couldn’t have cared less; it was the whipped cream that drove her away from the clatter of typewriters and the heat of debate, it was the calm of the coffeehouse that got to her. “The only worthwhile institution in our society—a shame that the coffeehouse will have to go, too,” Schwanger told Frank, Franny, Lilly, and me. “Drink up, dears!”
When you wanted whipped cream, you asked for
Schlagobers
, and if Schwanger meant “pregnant” to the other radicals, she meant pure
Schlagobers
to us children. She was our mother-like radical with a weakness for whipped cream; we really liked her.
And young Fräulein Fehlgeburt, whose major at the University of Vienna was American literature, adored Schwanger. We thought she seemed actually proud to be code-named “Miscarriage,” perhaps because we thought that
Fehlgeburt
, in German, could also mean “Abortion.” I’m sure this can’t be true, but in Frank’s dictionary, at least, the word for miscarriage and abortion was the same word,
Fehlgeburt
—which symbolizes perfectly our out-of-itness with the radicals, our failure to ever understand them. Every misunderstanding has at its center a breakdown of language. We never actually understood what these two women
meant
—the tough and mother-like Schwanger, marshaling forces (and money) for causes that struck us children as left of reason, but able to soothe us with her gentle and most logical
voice
, and her
Schlagobers
; and the waiflike, stuttering, shy university student of American literature, Miss Miscarriage, who read aloud to Lilly (not just to comfort a motherless child but to improve her English). She read so well that Franny, Frank, and I would almost always listen in. Fehlgeburt liked to read to us in Frank’s room, so it appeared that the dressmaker’s dummy was listening, too.
It was from Fräulein Fehlgeburt, in the Gasthaus Freud—with our father in France, with our Mother and Egg dragged from the cold sea (under the marker buoy that was Sorrow)—that we first heard the whole of
The Great Gatsby
; it was that ending, with Miss Miscarriage’s lilting Austrian accent, that really got to Lilly.
“‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter,’” Fehlgeburt read, excitedly, “‘—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther …’!” Miss Miscarriage read. “‘And one fine morning—’” Fehlgeburt paused; her saucer-like eyes seemed glazed by that green light Gatsby saw—maybe by the orgiastic future, too.
“What?” Lilly said, breathlessly, and a little echo of Egg was in Frank’s room with us.
“‘So we beat on,’” Fehlgeburt concluded, “‘boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”
“Is that
it
?” Frank asked. “Is it
over
?” He was squinting, his eyes were shut so tight.
“Of course it’s
over
, Frank,” Franny said. “Don’t you know an ending when you hear one?”
Fehlgeburt looked drained of her blood, her child-like face with a sad grown-up’s frown, a strand of her lank blond hair wrapped nervously around a neat pink ear. Then Lilly started in, and we couldn’t stop her. It was late afternoon, the whores hadn’t come around, but when Lilly started in, Susie the bear thought Screaming Annie was faking an orgasm in a room she didn’t belong in. Susie burst into Frank’s room, knocking the dressmaker’s dummy over and causing poor Fräulein Fehlgeburt to yip in alarm. But even that intrusion couldn’t stop Lilly. Her cry seemed caught in her throat, her grief seemed to be something she was sure to choke on; we could not believe such a small body could generate so much trembling, could orchestrate so much sound.
Of course, we were all thinking, it’s not that the
book
moved her so much—it’s that bit about being “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” it’s
our
past that’s moving her, we were all thinking; it’s Mother, it’s Egg, and how we won’t ever be able to forget them. But when we calmed her down, Lilly blurted out suddenly that it was
Father
she was crying for. “Father is a
Gatsby
,” she cried. “He
is
! I know he is!”
And we all started in on her, at once. Frank said, “Lilly, don’t let that ‘orgiastic future’ stuff get you down. It’s not exactly what Iowa Bob meant when he was always saying how Father
lives
in the future.”
“It’s a rather different future, Lilly,” I said.
“Lilly,” Franny said. “What’s ‘the green light,’ Lilly? I mean, for
Father
: what’s
his
green light, Lilly?”
“You see, Lilly,” Frank said, as if he were bored, “Gatsby was in love with the
idea
of being in love with Daisy; it wasn’t even Daisy he was in love with, not anymore. And Father hasn’t got a
Daisy
, Lilly,” Frank said, choking up just a little—because it had probably just occurred to him that Father didn’t have a
wife
anymore, either.
But Lilly said, “It’s the man in the white dinner jacket, it’s Father, he’s a Gatsby. ‘It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—’” Lilly quoted to us. “Don’t you
see
?” she shrieked. “There’s always going to be an
It
—and
It
is going to elude us, every time. It’s going to
always
get away,” Lilly said. “And Father’s not going to stop,” she said. “He’s going to keep going after it, and it’s always going to get away. Oh, damn it!” she howled, stamping her little foot. “Damn it! Damn it!” Lilly wailed, and she was off again, unstoppable—a match for Screaming Annie, who could only fake an orgasm; Lilly, we suddenly understood, could fake death itself. Her grief was so real that I thought Susie the bear was going to take the bear’s head off and pay a little human reverence, but Susie prowled through Frank’s room in her strictly bearish fashion; she bumped out the door, leaving us to deal with Lilly’s anguish.
Lilly’s
Weltschmerz
, as Frank would come to call it. “The rest of us have anguish,” Frank would say. “The rest of us have grief, the rest of us merely
suffer
. But
Lilly
,” Frank would say, “Lilly has true
Weltschmerz
. It shouldn’t be translated as ‘world-weariness,’” Frank would lecture us, “that’s much too mild for what Lilly’s got. Lilly’s
Weltschmerz
is like ‘world-
hurt
,’” Frank would say. “Literally ‘World’—that’s the
Welt
part—and ‘hurt,’ because that’s what the
Schmerz
part really is: pain, real ache. Lilly’s got a case of
world-hurt
,” Frank concluded, proudly.
“Kind of like
sorrow
, huh, Frank?” Franny asked.
“Kind of,” Frank said, stonily. Sorrow was no friend of Frank’s: not anymore.
In fact, the death of Mother and Egg—with Sorrow in Egg’s lap, and rising from the deep to mark the grave—convinced Frank to give up trying to properly pose the dead; Frank would give up taxidermy in all its forms. All manifestations of resurrection were to be abandoned by him. “Including religion,” Frank said. According to Frank, religion is just another kind of taxidermy.
As a result of Sorrow’s tricking him, Frank would come down very hard on
belief
of any kind. He would become a greater fatalist than Iowa Bob, he would become a greater nonbeliever than Franny or me. A near-violent atheist, Frank would turn to believing only in Fate—in random fortune or random doom, in arbitrary slapstick and arbitrary sorrow. He would become a preacher
against
every bill of goods anyone ever sold: from politics to morality, Frank was always for the opposition. By which Frank meant “the opposing forces.”
“But what exactly do these forces oppose, Frank?” Franny asked him, once.
“Just oppose every prediction,” Frank advised. “Anything anybody’s for, be against it. Anything anybody’s against, be for it. You get on a plane and it doesn’t crash, that means you got on the right plane,” Frank said. “And that’s
all
it means.”
Frank, in other words, went “off.” After Mother and Egg went away, Frank went ever farther away—somewhere—he went into a religion more vastly lacking in seriousness than even the established religions; he joined a kind of anti-everything sect.
“Or maybe Frank
founded
it,” Lilly said, once. Meaning nihilism, meaning anarchy, meaning trivial silliness and happiness in the face of gloom, meaning depression descending as regularly as night over the most mindless and joyful of days. Frank believed in
zap
! He believed in surprises. He was in constant attack and retreat, and he was equally, constantly, wide-eyed and goofily stumbling about in the sudden sunlight—tripping across the wasteland littered with bodies from the darkness of just a moment ago.
“He just went crazy,” Lilly said. And Lilly should know.
Lilly went crazy, too. She seemed to take Mother’s and Egg’s deaths as a personal punishment for some failure deep within herself, and so she resolved she would change. She resolved, among other things, to
grow
.
“At least a little,” she said, grimly determined. Franny and I were worried about her. Growth seemed unlikely for Lilly, and her strenuousness with which we imagined Lilly pursuing her own “growth” was frightening to Franny and me.
“I want to change, too,” I said to Franny. “But
Lilly
—I don’t know. Lilly is just Lilly.”
“Everyone knows that,” Franny said.
“Everyone except Lilly,” I said.
“Precisely,” Franny said. “So how are
you
going to change? You know something better than growing?”
“No. Not better,” I said. I was just a realist in a family of dreamers, large and small. I knew I
couldn’t
grow. I knew I would never really grow up; I knew my childhood would never leave me, and I would never be quite adult enough—quite responsible enough—for the world. The goddamn
Welt
, as Frank would say. I couldn’t change enough, and I knew it. All I could do was something that would have pleased Mother. I could give up swearing. I could clean up my language—which had upset Mother so. And so I did.
“You mean you’re not going to say ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or ‘cock-sucker’ or even ‘up yours’ or ‘in the ear’ or
anything
, anymore?” Franny asked me.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Not even ‘asshole’?” Franny asked.
“Right,” I said.
“You asshole,” Franny said.
“It makes as much sense as anything else,” Frank reasoned.
“You dumb prick,” Franny baited me.
“I think it’s rather noble,” Lilly said. “Small, but noble.”
“He lives in a second-rate whorehouse with people who want to start the world over and he wants to clean up his
language
,” Franny said. “Cunthead,” she told me. “You wretched fart,” Franny said. “Beat your meat all night and dream of tits, but you want to sound
nice
, is that it?” she asked.
“Come on, Franny,” Lilly said.
“You little turd, Lilly,” Franny said. Lilly started to cry.
“We’ve got to stick together, Franny,” Frank said. “This sort of abuse is not helpful.”
“You’re as queer as a cat fart, Frank,” she told him.
“And what are
you
, honey?” Susie the bear asked Franny. “What makes you think you’re so tough?”
“I’m not so tough,” Franny said. “You dumb bear. You’re just an unattractive girl, with zits—with zit
scars
: you’re scarred by zits—and you’d rather be a dumb bear than a human being. You think that’s tough? It’s fucking
easier
to be a bear, isn’t it?” Franny asked Susie. “And to work for an old blind man who thinks you’re smart—and beautiful, too, probably,” Franny said. “I’m
not
so tough,” Franny said. “But I
am
smart. I can get by. I can
more
than get by,” she said. “I can get what I want—when I know what it is,” she added. “I can see how things
are
,” Franny said. “And
you
,” she said, speaking to us all—even poor Miss Miscarriage—“you keep waiting for things to become something else. You think
Father
doesn’t?” Franny asked me, suddenly.
“He lives in the future,” Lilly said, still sniffling.
“He’s as blind as Freud,” Franny said, “or he soon will be. So you know what I’m going to do?” she asked us. “I’m
not
going to clean up my language. I’m going to aim my language wherever I want,” she told me. “It’s the one weapon I’ve got. And I’m only going to grow when I’m ready to, or when it’s time,” she told Lilly. “And I’m not
ever
going to be like
you
, Frank. No one else will ever be like you,” she added, affectionately. “And I’m not going to be a bear,” she told Susie. “You sweat like a pig in that stupid costume, you get your rocks off making people uneasy, but that’s because you’re
uneasy
just being
you
. Well, I’m easy being me,” Franny said.
“Lucky you,” Frank said.
“Yes, lucky you, Franny,” Lilly said.
“So what if you’re beautiful?” said Susie. “You’re also a bitch.”
“From now on, I’m mainly a
mother
,” Franny said. “I’m going to take care of you fuckers—you, you, and you,” Franny said, pointing to Frank and Lilly and me. “Because Mother’s not here to do it—and Iowa Bob is gone. The shit detectors are gone,” Franny said, “so I’m left to detect it. I point out the shit that’s my role.
Father doesn’t know what’s going on
,” Franny said, and we nodded—Frank, Lilly, and I; even Susie the bear nodded. We knew this was true: Father was blind, or he soon would be.
“Even so, I don’t need
you
to mother
me
,” Frank said to Franny, but he didn’t look so sure.
Lilly went and put her head in Franny’s lap; she cried there—comfortably, I thought. Franny, of course, knew that I loved her—hopelessly, and too much—and so I didn’t have to make a gesture or say anything to her.
“Well, I don’t need a sixteen-year-old straightening me out,” said Susie the bear, but her bear’s head was off; she held it in her big paws. Her ravaged complexion, her hurt eyes, her too-small mouth betrayed her. She put her bear’s head back on; that was her only authority.
The student, Miss Miscarriage, serious and well intentioned, seemed at a loss for words. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“Say it in German,” Frank encouraged her.
“Just spit it out any way you can,” Franny said.
“Well,” Fehlgeburt said. “That passage. That lovely passage, that
ending
—to
The Great Gatsby
—that’s what I mean,” she said.
“Get to it, Fehlgeburt,” Franny said. “Spit it out.”
“Well,” Fehlgeburt said. “I don’t know, but—somehow—it makes me want to go to the United States. I mean, it’s against my politics—your country—I know that. But that
ending
, all of it—somehow—is just so
beautiful
. It makes me want to
be
there. I mean, there’s no
sense
to it, but I would just like to be in the United States.”
“So you think
you’d
like to be there?” Franny said. “Well, I wish we’d never left.”
“Can we go back, Franny?” Lilly asked.
“We’ll have to ask Father,” Frank said.
“Oh boy,” Franny said. And I could see her imagining that moment, waltzing a little reality into Father’s dreams.
“Your country, if you’ll forgive me,” said one of the other radicals-the one they called simply Arbeiter (
Arbeiter
means “worker” in German), “your country is really a
criminal
place,” Arbeiter said. “If you’ll forgive me,” he added, “your country is the ultimate triumph of corporate creativity, which means it is a country controlled by the
group
–thinking of corporations. These corporations are without humanity because there is no one personally responsible for their use of power; a corporation is like a computer with profit as its source of energy—and profit as its necessary fuel. The United States is—you’ll forgive me—quite the worst country in the world for a humanist to live in, I think.”
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